How to Start a YouTube Channel for Beginners in 2024 (Step-by-Step) | Ben Rowlands | Skillshare
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How to Start a YouTube Channel for Beginners in 2024 (Step-by-Step)

teacher avatar Ben Rowlands, Content Creator with 800,000 Followers

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Starting a YouTube Channel - Introduction

      1:03

    • 2.

      Overview of my Channel - What I do and Who am I?

      5:03

    • 3.

      The Power of YouTube - Why YouTube is one of the best Social Media Platforms

      5:15

    • 4.

      Identifying Your Niche - Money or Meaning?

      6:04

    • 5.

      YouTuber Mindset - Consistency, Fear, Hate and Persistence

      8:38

    • 6.

      What makes a YouTube Video Successful?

      8:58

    • 7.

      Planning YouTube Videos

      10:51

    • 8.

      Filming a YouTube Video

      5:52

    • 9.

      Editing a Video

      8:17

    • 10.

      Creating a Thumbnail

      5:48

    • 11.

      Uploading a Video - The Process (Cards, Title, Keywords, Ads, Processing etc.)

      7:51

    • 12.

      Being a YouTube Partner - Benefits and Features

      7:11

    • 13.

      Becoming a YouTube Partner - My Journey

      4:25

    • 14.

      More Skillshare Classes Coming!

      0:40

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About This Class

I filmed this course when I had 7,000 before I grew my main channel to over 500,000 subscribers only a year or so later. Which highlights the things I was talking about to be correct. In this class I am going to take you behind the scenes into my YouTube Channel! Talking you through what I have learnt from being a YouTuber! Growing my Channel from 100 Subs to over 7,000 Subscribers in the last year!

In this class you will learn:

  • The Power of YouTube

  • What makes a YouTube Video Successful

  • Making your First Video

  • How to Plan a YouTube Video

  • How to Edit and Upload a YouTube Video

  • YouTube Partner Programme

  • YouTube Strategies

I want to show you the important aspects of growing a YouTube Channel! How to plan, film, edit and create engaging videos. That will help you grow your audience quicker. My aim with this course is to share current YouTube Strategies that are working, for small channels trying to grow. Obviously, you can take a class from a large YouTuber with 100,000's of Subscribers, and it will be extremely valuable there is no dispute. However, there is a good chance that it has been 2/3 YEARS since they started and had 0 Subscribers. So the techniques they may share, may no longer work on the platform.

I want to take you through my YouTube Video Creation process and my YouTube Partner Journey. Explaining strategies I used to boost momentum in the YouTube Algorithm and grow my channel faster!

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

Ben Rowlands

Content Creator with 800,000 Followers

Teacher

Ben Rowlands is a 24-year-old Content Creator who has made a significant impact in the digital world, amassing an impressive 800,000 Followers and a staggering 500,000,000 Views across social media. Renowned for his deep passion for Tech, Gaming, and Music, Ben has skillfully leveraged his interests to build a diverse and highly successful online presence. Within just one year, he grew his YouTube channel to over 100,000 subscribers, and on TikTok, it took only a few months for him to reach the same milestone.

Ben's channels span multiple niches, making him a versatile presenter. With the ability to adapt across content styles, providing greater knowledge and understanding of what it takes to be a full-time creator. In addition to his life as a content creator, Ben is a... See full profile

Level: Beginner

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Transcripts

1. Starting a YouTube Channel - Introduction: So in this course, I want to help you get started with your Youtube channel by giving you a behind the scenes look into my YouTube channel and some of the strategies that I've been applying over the past year because I have grown from less than 100 subscribers to over 7 thousand subscribers. And I want to show you some of the things I've been doing to help me become a heat you partner and also maintain momentum within the YouTube algorithm. Because one of the most important things about starting a YouTube channel and growing your YouTube channel is understanding the importance. Strategy, where everybody goes wrong is the lack of focus when they begin. Now, right now in 2021, there is a huge opportunity to start your very own YouTube channel. Everybody says it's too late, it's oversaturated. There's too many channels. There's no point in even trying. However, in the pasture, online video consumption has absolutely skyrocketed and you'd be a fool to not be a part of this growth. So if you want to start go YouTube channel and understand some of the best practices that I have implemented over the past year than Jamie here for my YouTube basics master class. 2. Overview of my Channel - What I do and Who am I?: So before we continue with this course, let's first take a look at what I actually do on YouTube because there's no point you're following along if you have no idea what my channel actually is and what I've achieved in the pasture on the platform. Now since I started my YouTube channel in the pasture, I have grown from less than 100 subscribers to now over 7 thousand subscribers. And the type of content I do is music. Now my channels called Ben Rollins music and I do music product reviews, music product demonstrations. And of course, I also do like cover videos and original songs as well in that music video style formats. This is my actual YouTube channel. Over here you can see I've spent the time to create a custom banner, which is really important to store the display where your channels about. So you can see here, it tells you my upload schedule. I do three videos a week. So it says I upload on Tuesday, Thursdays, and Saturdays. And also you can see here I've placed some very key products that I discussed on my channel. So I've got able to live over here, which is a music software that I do a lot of tutorials on. Gotten me here with a guitar because I'm primarily a guitarist, so that signifies I play the electric guitar. And then also I have this guitar pedal up here, which is called a loop pedal, which is a particular guitar pedal I prioritize and niche down within on YouTube, and I'll explain that in just a moment. Now if you take a look at the overview of my channel, you can see all of the different videos that I uploaded within the past year. And you can see primarily I do product overviews and product reviews. You can see here I'm taking some of the latest, gets hah pedals, guitar, amplifier pedals, and also some guitars in particular as well. Taking a first look and an unboxing video over here. Now I also do other content types. I used to do a lot of tutorials at the very beginning before I had any form of revenue to purchase all of these products that was coming from the channel. I did loads and loads of tutorials on products I already owned, which was like old equipment that had been using for years in digging with than anew inside out that I could just really videos together really quickly. However, as my channel grew and I had a bit more income coming aim whenever they can eat you partner, I could finally afford to buy newer products and start reviewing those and doing tutorials on those, which has helped my channel grow a lot quicker because I'm taking a look at more relevant and in the now products which has helped quite a low. But that's something that's the progression of UFC starting a channel in a business. You need to grow it up to get revenue to justify investing into it, to take it to the next level. Now just for your reference, I'll scroll down just a tad so you can see the old format that it used to take. But you can see throughout the Christmas period, I was doing a lot of a bias guides on loop stations, which is the product ie specialize in all these different red petals over here. It's doing like bias guides on those because that's my niche live looping. I'm like a expert within that you could sort of claim. And then obviously down here, I started to do more tutorial based things. You can see all this stuff is tutorials, tutorials, loads, if tutorials. This was before I was in the YouTube Partner Program. All I was doing with tutorials, because the great thing about a tutorial is it's discoverable within the YouTube search when people search for a problem, how to do X on YouTube, my video will come up in search because I've created a video to solve that problem someone has personally having. So that's the power of giving tutorials at the very beginning. Like think of the amount of times you've maybe search like how to do fix it problem you've had like maybe reset your iCloud on your Apple device or, or reset your laptop is something dead salient, simple like that. But there's loads of videos crop up that have millions and millions of views because it's a frequently searched problem and you have a resolution to that issue. Now in total, on my YouTube channel, I have done over 218 videos and that's in the past year or so. I've only been on YouTube and maybe like a year and a month or something like that. So that's a lot of videos that I've done and we'll talk about why I've done that many videos and how I've done that many videos sort of throughout the duration of this course. When we take a look inside of my analytics and I talk through what my channel does. But on average, at the moment, my youtube channel is gaining around a 125 thousand views per month. And that's been pretty stable for the past three months because back in October, my channel basically doubled in views. I literally went from my 50 thousand views to a 100 thousand views within a single period. And that's because a lot of new products were being launched. And I sort of piled it on the back of those products by getting my hands on them as soon as I possibly could and maximize the most out of the holiday season on my channel just by absolutely going for it with all of my different videos. So hope that gives you a little bit of an overview of the type of content that I do, all the way, ranging from product reviews to performance videos to tutorials like this, live streaming on over here. Everything that I do relates always back to music. So it's relevant to my core audiences have subscribed, but it's always stuff that will be valuable to them. Even if it's something a little bit weird like GoPro review that I have on my channel over here. It's still kind of relevant to a musician because right now musicians need to start creating online content and what's the best begin a camera, probably a GoPro because of its versatility. So that's what I'm always looking at, trying to do on my channel. Although I talk about music, like took about tech and things that are relevant to my audience and demographic. 3. The Power of YouTube - Why YouTube is one of the best Social Media Platforms: So first off, I want to establish why I think YouTube is the best social media platform that you can create video content for. Now, me personally, my main gripe with all the other social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and even tick tock. Tick tock is really popular right now for organic reach and it's really easy to grow a following on that platform due to how hot it is right now and fresh. My problem with all of the platforms are just listed is the fact you spend hours and hours creating all this content for it. And there's no way to realistically monetize that consent unless you rely on sponsored posts, which is obviously reaching out to brands and having brands reach out to you to basically pay you to create content for them on your page. How, whether we've YouTube, it's quite a different ecosystem. It's really clever how it works. You create your videos on YouTube and watch or a YouTube partner, YouTube, which is Google, puts ads on your videos of which pays you for creating content for their platform, which I just really like as a model in general. Now the really clever thing about YouTube as well compared to other social media platforms is the fact that YouTube is a searchable content library of videos and it's evergreen content. Now, my main problem again with Instagram, Facebook, and tick tock is you spend hours creating a really cool, flashy video that gets loads of likes. And then after 48 hours, that video basically becomes irrelevant in people's feeds. It hardly crops up in people's feeds anymore and people are on to the next great thing that just being posted by somebody else onto your next great thing that you've posted the next day. It's really short-lived, shortlived concept. It literally just has its shelf life of 48 hours. And then no one remembers that it even existed after that point. Whereas with YouTube, because it's a searchable platform with this huge algorithm, you could create like a tutorial video on how to set up a camera or something like that. And people could be searching for that problem that they're having in their life. And your video will crop up from 12 months ago, 18 months ago, or even six months ago because it's a searchable platform. So it means you can create loads of consent that lasts a very long time, which can then earn the revenue over a very long period of time because it stays relevant on the YouTube platform. That's why I have chosen YouTube in particular, to build my following on competitive Instagram and Facebook and all those other platforms that I personally too keen on. So this video right here is a prime example of how the YouTube algorithm works and what evergreen content actually is. Now with this video here, I uploaded this in around May time of 20-20. And obviously that was during the period where the world began to change, everything became online in the new medium that people were consuming was live streams, musicians were live streaming. Their gigs are the creatives are livestreaming other things, businesses, we're live streaming things. This was the way to get your forms of entertainment right at the beginning. So what I decided to do on YouTube was I decided to create the sort of livestream video series. So I took this sort of multi-camera livestream tutorial, for example, showing people how to use their iPhone and their webcams to create a professional looking multi-camera livestream. And actually can see when I uploaded it in May, it didn't perform and create any form of miracles. You can see it performed very low compared to my typical videos. If you see here, typical average at this period was between a 120 to a 170 views and it was well below the typical average during this period in bear in mind, I didn't even have a 1000 subscribers at this point on YouTube. I was about 900. I was just about to become a YouTube partner and get 1000 Serb who was a few weeks away from achieving that. And then you can see it just ticked away in the background, steady and slow. And then suddenly in September, the video just began to skyrocket. And it now has got over 25 thousand views, which is pretty impressive to see. And this is an awesome example of how this YouTube algorithm works. I almost a less than a year later, the video has over 25 thousand views and you can see inside of the real-time view count here, in the last 48 hours alone, these video was almost generated 500 views on my channel. And still to this day, this is usually in my top three videos every 48 hours for my most viewed content. Now, the interesting thing to notice with this video is the traffic sources. Now you can see almost 80% of the traffic source is coming from YouTube search. So this is people typing into YouTube multi-camera livestream setup, how to tutorial. And I'm cropping up pretty high and ranking pretty high in search for those search terms which highlights the evergreen content and the importance of creating evergreen content that has a very long shelf lights of relevancy. And that's how you can sort of dominate on YouTube. And this is an example of what you cannot achieve on other social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and tiktaalik or those types of sites. Because if you do not get the crazy engagement in like the first 48 hours of the video going live, then it literally dies after the first 48 hours and no one ever sees it ever again. So if I'd have posted and this type of video that was more relevant to Facebook for example, just for example purposes, you would have seen my video would have just died in the algorithm within the first 48 hours because it only generated like a 100 views in total. Whereas now because of how YouTube works, has over 25 thousand views and its ranking really high in search. And it drives so much traffic and traction into my YouTube channel every single day. 4. Identifying Your Niche - Money or Meaning?: Now the next thing you need to identify with your Youtube channel is what niche you actually want to create your videos within. Now there's two approaches you can take to this. You could go for meaningful videos to use something that you're passionate about and you really enjoy and wants to create and share with the world. Or you could go with a monetization no mindset basically create YouTube videos that, you know, have a very high rate and they're going to make the most money for the amount of time that is spent making them. Now, obviously, the way YouTube works is you may be surprised by this, depending on what niche and what topic you saw to discuss within your video will depend on how valuable the ad slot is on that video. So for example, if you're talking about money, how to invest money, how to buy real estate. Those UG videos have the most insane ad rate, EBIT. We actually like something like 45 pounds to 65 lbs per 1000 View. The ads are willing to pay on those videos, which means it's a very profitable niche on YouTube. However, if you may be talking about something like fishing, fishing is super popular. People like fishing, but it has a very niche audience of actually the types of people that buy fishing rods in the tackle and everything that goes with that. And the types of companies that sell fishing rods are going to be putting ads on YouTube because they're usually like more traditional companies that don't really do a lot of promotion on social media. So if you're doing a fishing channel, you're not really going to have many ads that are going to be put onto those videos because the companies little bit more old fashioned create those products. Whereas if you do more tech oriented things, oh, investing money, there's loads of apps like Robin Hood and Weibull that are willing to spend loads on ads to get people aware of their product and their new app. Because there is state of the art tech company that have a huge budget because they have the best and the biggest app on the App Store. So that's the sort of explanation of how that roughly works. Now for me personally, I started off just creating videos that I was sort of an expert within my skillset. Obviously, IG music, I'm guitar, it's not types that, but I in particular inside of music, I do this subcategory called live looping, where basically you easy things. I loop pedals and we perform as a one man band recording all of the different instruments. And that was something that I was an expert within that I could talk about to create loads of content for my channel. So I chose something that was meaningful to meet personally for the brand that I actually wanted to create within my music artist thing that I was trying to grow. So that's something to bear in mind when you're trying to choose your niche. Now something that's really important to be aware of when you choose your niche is the actual amount of people that are interested in the topic you're talking about now, obviously I do a lot of loop pedal things that I was talking about. So obviously I do a lot of videos on these boss loop stations. You can see here, everything I do is usually boss related, which is a huge company within the music space. I think that the biggest one products for this type of stuff. So you can see at all I do is stuff about loop pedals, reviews, tutorials, buying guides, and all that type of stuff. Now a problem I obviously have here is I have a very small cap on how far I can grow this channel within this loop pedal market, because there's only so many people that own a loop pedal, but then there's also so many people that own a boss repair, which is the particular brand that I specialize within on my YouTube channel. And I believe boss of only sold like a million units of all of their loop stations combined across the last like 1020 years. So that means theoretically, I could probably realistically get maybe a 100 thousand subscribers talking about this particular niche because obviously there's a language barrier with on all those units that they've sold worldwide. Also, people who maybe don't watch YouTube within those units that have sold. So realistically, best-case scenario, that's as far as I could grow this YouTube channel. So it's important for me if I want to have the biggest YouTube channel that I start off in a niche that I'm an expert within. But as I grow and mature as a human, I begin to expand out into other subcategories to constantly keep the channel evolving and attracting other parts of the music space into my channels. For example, expanding more into guitar related things to get more guitars. Because obviously there's millions and millions of guitars that I could attract into the channel. Maybe even looking at drumming, get if you drummers into the channel as well and start creating other types of content around the core of what the channel is about and what I am personally got the unique skill within, but it allows me to grow it further than just simply talking about a boss looper pedal and that particular brand. So that's something that you sort of have to think about when you're creating your channel is yes, I'm going to create on this niche that I'm really good at. But how far can you grow it? You may be happy with having a Cabot 25 thousand subscribers, and that's what you're happy with. But if you really want to be the biggest channel, you have to start thinking about how you can use what you're good at and growing outwards in a different way. So you can see here an example of me beginning to branch out trying other content types. The channel further is this review of this television. I recently got the new LG OLED TV, which is a really popular training television at the moment, I've got this to edit my EEG videos on. So I pick this TV up and you can see that it's got about almost 9 thousand views within the last few months. Now if we take a look at the analytics on this video, you can see considering that it's got nothing to do with music and it's more orientated around tech in editing videos, the performance of this video is absolutely fantastic. And C, at first they perform relatively okay, and then it came out of the little average grey market, far exceeded anything that I uploaded within the November period. You can see in usually I have around 2 thousand views to 3 thousand views on average at this period, and it's almost 10 thousand views this video at that same point, judiciaries highlights how trying different content types that are still relevant to what you talk about can still work if you execute it correctly, you can see YouTube searches driving most of the traffic here for me again, and it gave me 23 subscribers. So it has helped me grow the channel in a different category. So now in the future are proven this content site works for my channel. So I could potentially talk about something similar in the future. Just a kind of an example of how you can expand out of your niche, but still keep it relevant. 5. YouTuber Mindset - Consistency, Fear, Hate and Persistence: Now before we go any further with this course, I want to talk about some of the mindset changes you have to have as a YouTube creator. Now, something you have to understand from the very beginning is the consistency mindset that it takes to create content on your YouTube channel. The main problem people have is they expect after making four or five videos, that the attraction will begin to come through on the YouTube channel. And then when it doesn't, they become very de-motivated and struggled to push through and just keep going until it finally happens. Now for me personally, if we take a look at my channel over the actual past few years, based in the last year since I've started doing YouTube. So if we take a look at my channel, so you can see here over the lifetime of my channel, how my youtube channel has growing slow and steady. There hasn't been any crazy peaks. It has made it blow up. It's just literally ticked away to the point where it is now. So I sort of started uploading videos in 2019 here for some reason, YouTube glitches and doesn't show them. But I started uploading videos around the sort of August period and you can see us getting maybe like 20 hours a day, nine views a day, which is really, really slow. But as soon as I started on YouTube, The first thing I did was I committed to doing two videos a week. So from the very first video I uploaded in like August, from that point, I just uploaded two videos a week. Two videos a week. And didn't stop, I committed and my headset, right. We're going to do two videos a week consistently. And then we'll assess it in a few months time to see how that did. So once I committed to that mindset, I actually found it okay, do two videos a week. It was pretty hard because I never knew how to film or edit a video. But the more I did, the more I got used to it, the quicker I got it doing them, which is really useful. And then around the November period, I got quite confident in making two videos a week and I wanted to challenge myself to do more. So in December of 2019, I decided to challenge myself to do three videos a week for the entirety of the month to see whether I could handle the workload and whether it made a difference in terms of the channel growth. So when I committed to that new schedule, things started to pick up on the channel and then I changed my strategy from this point. So you can see here in December, I began doing three videos a week. So if we actually take a look at December in detail, you can see that the average views per day greatly increased over what I was getting previously in the months before, throughout October and November. And there's a reason why this happens. You can see these little squares here every time I uploaded a video. So these are the little videos that I've already three a week all the way throughout the month. And you can see because we were consistently uploading an even amount of videos, it began to really level out the upload schedule. You can see how the views really started to stabilize across the week. And then suddenly in the second week of three videos, I started to hit like 280 views per day, 230 views per day, which was absolutely crazy for me at that point in time. Now the reason why it is happening, looking back with a different retrospective approach, it was because I was creating momentum within the algorithm. The problem I had with two videos a week was I would upload a video and then it will perform and it would get views, and then it would. Drop right down until I uploaded my next video on Thursday later that week. So it upload on Tuesday and then I wouldn't upload anything until Thursday in and it will peak again. And then I wouldn't upload anything from Thursday through to choose day, which was a huge period where there was nothing happening on my youtube channel. So what would happen after the peak on a Thursday? The views would drop all the way back down and I would lose all of the momentum of that video peaking at Thursday. So by uploading a video again on Saturday, it would then mean the momentum with sustained throughout the weekend. And it would bridge the gap between Thursday through to choose day, keeping the momentum more stable. And you can see this within this algorithm here you can see, so let me explain what I mean here you can see here at the start of December, the views began to stabilize across the week because we had this extra video bridging the gap between these two videos that I was traditionally doing this men across this weekend, the views had momentum and they sustain as opposed to dropping down like they traditionally would. So because we had this extra video between Thursday, Tuesday, this meant the views continued at the same rate. Now because we built this momentum in the algorithm. It then, then in the second week, it boosted the visa into the 200 reason, which was like going viral for me at this point in time. Now I was going to be YouTube famous at this rate with these views per day compared to what I was getting in the previous months. But you can see we've sustained momentum into Tuesday, and then we've built further momentum into Thursday flying at 280, which is absolutely crazy, and then it did back down. So I didn't upload anything on Friday and it would have continued to dip if I didn't then upload that third video on Saturday because obviously would have tipped on Friday. And then again on Saturday because there was nothing being uploaded. However, it went back up it up a rocket it backup which rescued the views, keeping that momentum going throughout the week and throughout the month, continuing into the next week. So you can see we've now got a new average of a 140 views per day from what we had last week, which was a 100 views per day. And then bang, momentum digs down. Momentum recovered, keeps going into the weekend, and then obviously it drips back down. This was the week of Christmas, so it was obviously going to be a slow, weak Boxing Day wasn't too bad, and then so on and so forth. And this month in total generated me a 100 subscribers and 5 thousand views, which is absolutely crazy for the time. You may look at that laugh. I think that's really stupid, but seriously really good results. And I was really pleased with everything in how it worked because I know it's how the three videos a week work so well, this then continued through 2020. So I then made the decision for the whole of 20-20, I was going to do three videos a week. No matter what. They actually did more than three videos a week. And I'll talk to you about why I did that in a moment as well. Now another thing you have to become comfortable with when starting a YouTube channel is the actual fear that comes with beginning and filming the videos. You're putting yourself online, on the internet for a random people to watch your videos in and judge you and comment in the sections how wrong you are if you say something about a product and it doesn't line up with their opinion. And also your personal circle of friends or people you used to know it's school or work or whatever. Though, their judgment of view going on camera and looking pretty cringing because I'm gonna be honest, my first probably like a 150 videos but are basically really grungy. Looking back at it, I first began off talking really he like sort of quiet and soft because I didn't want to be too loud. And then I thought I need to up the energy of it so I try to be more energetic and kinda went over the top in doing that. And then eventually it matured into the style that it is now. Or I can be ready energetic at times, then also talk pretty slow at points as well and keep it at a different level. It's all about the dynamic within the video. And that comes with doing the video. You not gonna nail it the first time. You will eventually get there. Because the problem I had when I first started off as well was I talked really, really slowly because I was trying to think about what I wanted to say and I was talking to the camera and never done that in my life, I talked really slower as now, I'm super comfortable because I've created like 200 YouTube videos and like 500 videos for my courses in the pasture. So it's something that you every single day and have trained up that muscle almost as if I go to like you go into the YouTube Jim and catered. I cleaned up that muscle to make them more comfortable. When you start off, you add the finished article. Unlike with a traditional skill that you're learning, usually if you learn the guitar, for example, you practice for hours on end behind the scenes in your bedroom and nobody ever sees you play a note or a code and then suddenly you're slash, they see you rock it out these solos because you've practiced behind the scenes and no one was aware of the development that was going on. However, we've YouTube, your whole development is public on the internet. It's a complete timeline that people are spectating from when you're a beginner through to intermediate 3u to the finished article. So people see you from the stock all the way through to the end progressing because otherwise you cannot progress if you're not uploading the videos onto YouTube, it's very, very, very scary from that aspect, you could say, because you have to publicly display yourself from being terrible to grey, which you never usually do when you're developing a skill until you're competent with it. That's when you find the show people you can actually do. Now in terms of addressing the fear aspect of starting the channel, the only way to combat it is to literally just start creating videos and uploading it. I had loads of people laughing at all I was doing and saying it was distributed at first. But now I do it as a full time thing and it's grown way beyond what I thought it would in the last year. And the truth is the reason why they are missing what you're doing and laughing all you're doing is because truthfully they wanna do it themselves. So you be the one that does it and they can do whatever they like. 6. What makes a YouTube Video Successful?: So let's talk about what makes a YouTube video successful. There's loads of different attributes that contribute to the success of a YouTube video. But there's a few very key ones that you really need to focus on at the very beginning. Now I've got a couple of examples of videos on my channel that have performed very well. And I want to break down why I personally think these videos have been successful. So you get a little bit of a inside like in perspective of how these videos are performed, which is really important to know. So one of my most interesting performing videos is this review of a guitar loop pedal. It's a guitar pedal that you can use to enhance your performances. Now the interesting thing about this product is it's actually really old. I think it's around nine years old. He came out maybe 2011, something like that. And when I did this review, it was in 2020, so it wasn't exactly a trending topic of much relevance for the video still perform well for a few key reasons. So if we take a look at the actual approach I took through this video, I actually made it a sort of retrospective review. I said, is the boss loop station still worthy in 20-20, I've now changed 2021 because that's the urine now six years later. So that's obviously saying we're looking back six years ago is still relevant. Is the outdated? Do we need a new on? Should you still buy it or should you wait a year for a new pedals? So it kind of has that intrigue factor from the very beginning because of the approach that's taken within the video. Now something that's really important, that contributes to the success of a YouTube video. At least sort of statistics down here, the average percentage viewed. Now this is the watch time or watch duration. So on YouTube, what the YouTube algorithm does is it measures so that the average view duration that people watch the video for. So for example, on this video, the average view duration is 33.2%. So that means the average person watches the video for 33% of it, which is around five minutes of this 15 minute Video. Now that's not too bad for a video of this land obviously could be much higher. You should sort of aim for the 40% region, but you have to bear in mind that this is a product reviews. So people are often see clicking on there to make a buying decision. And then as soon as you may say a con about the product or something that doesn't line up with what they want. Obviously, that buying decision is being made. It's either a yes or no. You've said something that's a no, it's a con. So they click straight out of the video because the products no longer applicable. So don't get too stressed sometimes when you are little bit disheartened by the performance of a watch time of a product review, for example, because usually that's one of the reasons people have clicked off because they've realized it's not applicable to them and it may be is outdated in this instance. It's a six year later review, so that's something to bear in mind. But for a 15-minute video, that's a pretty solid watch time because it's a pretty long detailed nerdy review going through everything I know about this protocol in particular. Now, one thing I want to point out is actually the traffic sources of a video. Now, obviously you've got the watch time, which is really important that tells the algorithm that this is a really interesting video. People that click on this video really enjoy it. They stay for the duration of this video around 40 to 50% really good ballpark. So the algorithm's gonna push that to more people because it's proven to be interesting. But some other factors that contribute to that as well that are really important are the click-through rate. So if we take a look inside of the reach. Pot over here, just clicking over to this tab, you'll see here the click-through rate on this video is 8%. Let's just round it up. It's an 8% click-through rates. So that means out of the people that had been presented with this video, 8% of people click through and convert to actually watch it. Now you can see obviously it's been all the way as high as almost 12%, 10 percent. Now with this statistic here, I would say you should always aim for a 10% click-through rate, basically a 10% conversion of the amount of impressions. Because you can see with this video, it has had almost a 130 thousand impressions of which of those we've had 8% average click-through rate, which is converted to about 15 thousand views, which is a good ratio. You got to remember as well, because I mean a really specific niche. Youtube may have presented this video to other people. Because what YouTube does is when you sort of meet the requirements of a good watch time and a good click-through rate, it begins to push it out to more and more people. Honest, like a second wave of people will get presented with it inside of their brows feature or the search or whatever. And you gotta remember, it may have actually shown it with them impressions to people that don't even know what this loop pedal is and have no interest, but there may be a guitar player. So that's why the algorithm has presented it to them because it's kind of applicable to guitarists and not really interested in that side of guitar playing. So that's not due to the video performance, the impressions here I'd say it's more down to the cap on the niche of the product that has kind of bottleneck this video for me personally, now something that's really cool, that blew my mind on this video on why I want to show you it is actually the traffic sources types. Now you can see here it breaks down all of the different traffic sources that are contributing to these views and these impressions. So these are the people that had abused. So these are the traffic sources views. So as you can see, we've got YouTube search. We've got a browse feature, external and all these other thing channel pages and all that type of stuff you can see. Once again, most of the percentage of use for this video is in the YouTube search. So this means when people are searching for this boss RC 300 loop station review, I'm ranking extremely high for that search term. So 60% of the track if traffic is coming from people that are actually lucky to still buy this product, which is really good. It shows the videos well optimized, which is really important. If you want to grow your channel, you want to rank in search by using keywords, creating great titles, and also great thumbnails. Now obviously, something that actually is interesting about this search thing, if we go to the external source, you can see about 5% of the external traffic sources are below over here. But you can see this video is ranking on Google Search. So when people are literally searching for the boss, us E3, 100 looper pedal, I'm ranking on Google Search, literally like as if I'm a product page, I'm ranking there because obviously YouTube is Google. So when you search for particular products, sometimes YouTube videos rank within that search. So this video along the traffic is actually coming from Google itself onto the YouTube platform from people just searching for the product generically inside of Google, which is really interesting in, in, in the past, this number has been much higher than it is as I'm showing you right now, it's really interesting that that's what's actually happening here. Now I want to show you this other video for comparison, which was another guitar related product. This time it was a much broader reach. It could have. It was a guitar amplifier, digital guitar amplifier. So literally any guitarist in the world would be interested in this product. So with this one here, as you can see, and it has had about 20 thousand views. It's had around 20 thousand views. I uploaded it in October, and it's performing really, really well. Now the watch duration is higher on this video, it's 40%. You can see right here it's 40% on the actual video, yes, it's a shorter videos that's obviously going to be higher anyways. But if we take a look at the click-through rate, you can see this video has got a basically a twelv percent click-through rate. It's extremely, extremely high. It's converting real. I can see on some days it's had almost 17 to 18% click-through rate. It's a very solid click-through rate. And the reason why I think this is so successful is because of the thumbnail. Now, if you look at these two videos that I'm showing you right now, there's a direct correlation in design of the thumbnail and I've taken, and this clearly has begun to work. So you can see we have this amplifier here and it says the text above it just say neural cortex, too much hype we're talking about, is it over-hyped this product? And if we take a look at the other video, you can see we've got a picture of the product and then we have a text saying both RC 300 review six years later. So there's clearly something to do with this thumbnail design that's working really well with this particular video and this particular category and content_type on YouTube, this clearly is working for people in an actual design because this is a crazy click-through rate that's like Youtube genius level. If I say so myself in terms of click-through rate. And you can see once again, the YouTube search is a prominent in the actual traffic source type. Same again, Google search ranking Google search when people are searching for it, pretty much duplicate results, what we were just looking at. But it's that click-through rate that's making these video absolutely fly. And pretty much every single day, this video usually gets around 300 to 500 times 650 views in the last 48 hours. Every time I click into YouTube and view my most viewed videos. As of the last few days, this one's always in the number one top slot, which is really crazy to think in terms of a video performance. So when you're trying to figure out what makes a YouTube video successful, it's the watch time, the watch duration, people watch it for the click-through rate and also the title and thumbnail. Those, those compliment the click-through rate and then the keywords within the title help it rank within the search, which makes the video very discoverable. 7. Planning YouTube Videos: So I now want to take you behind the scenes of filming a THE video. In the next few lessons, we're going to take a look at the actual process of planning, filming, editing, and finally, uploading our video to the YouTube platform. Now there's loads of different ways you can actually go about planning HD video, which we're going to take a look at in this specific lesson. Now the first way to plan a YouTube video is to literally script the entire video word for word and use a teleprompter 2%, the video camera. Now for me personally, I do not create my videos in this fashion because as a solo creator, I find it takes way too long for me to plan and script the video ahead of time. And then present that to the camera. Although you save a lot of time actually in the filming setup like this right now because you're just reading a script, the actual upfront work for me seems a little bit counterproductive. Now my preferred method for planning a YouTube video, each to actually create a rough skeleton for the video, different sorted chapters of what's going to happen and then create little bullet points so that I can talk around and free, free flow on the camera like I am right now. Now the video that I want to take you behind the scenes on today is my first impressions review of the new Herman Miller logic tech g, m body game Jen. And this is a really controversial gaming chair slash office chair due to its high price point. If you take a look on YouTube, there's not too many reviews of this product, but the reviews that do exist got crazy amount of views. So this is a video was creating, although it could be deemed as a boring topic, because it's just a desk chair. Now I like to plan all of my YouTube videos inside of Google Docs. Now the great thing about Google Docs is you can download the Google Drive app on your iPad and your iPhone and it seems all of your documents up onto all of your other devices. So this means I can plan everything on my laptop and then I can go booted up on my iPad, which is much easier for me to take around the studio while I'm actually filming. So let's actually start off with the title of this YouTube video. Now this is going to be a work in progress title that will just allow me to figure out what the video is actually going to include and contained within my review. Now what I'm kind of thinking, I obviously want to mention the high price of this product to get that sort of reaction within the title because it's so expensive in terms of an actual office chair. And then I want to sort of say what the product is for keyword searches in terms of people actually searching for it on both Google and YouTube. So we're gonna say something like 1100000, $500, because obviously we're going to use the dollar amount because that's higher than how much it was in the UK. It was actually more nearer to a thousand pounds here in the UK. So we're going to use the dollar amount because it's a bigger number. And we're going to put $100 a office chair or gaming chair for now. We'll put gaming chair and preserving life. Is it worth it? And then we'll put the product name, which is Herman Miller. Logic tick G, logy, tech, chair reviews. That's roughly what we're going to do for the actual title. Obviously will flush it out when we make the thumbnail and actually upload it and may even put the price in the thumbnail and keep the title and much shorter. That's roughly what it's going to look like for the work in progress. So we obviously want to talk about the review of the product, my first impressions, and we want to discuss the price within the actual video because that's the major talking point of this actual project. Now I like to play my videos from this point in actual M different chapters. So as you can see here, I have the introduction. So that's sort of a chapter. And then I mentioned the little bullet points for this introduction. So this will just be the video purpose. So something like, hey, what's up, hobby, having a fantastic day in today's video, we're going to be reviewing x and then we'll talk about the product and what we're gonna do in the video, solve a little teaser. Then from this point, I like to get straight into the reviews. Now what I've learned from doing my YouTube videos is the quicker you get to the video and get to the point, the more retention you get within the video. The problem is what a lot of people do is they spend ages saying Like subscribe and all that type of rubbish at the start of the video. And then everyone's gotten bored and clicked out at that point because they are just there to get value and actually learn about the product. They're not interested in subscribing yet because you haven't served them with anything to subscribe for. So I've learned that from my structure. So I now skip that and go straight into the good stuff. So what I actually want to do is go to rough notes on a piece of paper here before I started flushing out. So I'm sorta thinking going straight into the features. So we're gonna just grab this little title here and we'll change this and we'll say features. So I wanna go straight into some of the key features of this product and we'll write the bullet points now so we know what they are. Now This chair has got some really crazy things that it can do for the price, which is why it's kind of work that we're going to put some of these bullet points in this section here. So I'm now included all of the features and specification that I want to talk about inside of my review. Now what I've learned from making over 200 YouTube videos is it's best to go to the manufacturers official website to get the features and Specifications Information, read through all of the text and put that into your own bullet point lists. Because what I learned in the past from an IUD Honi made a handful of YouTube videos. I would sometimes watch other people's reviews on YouTube and assume that they're specifications were correct and write it down on the notes section. And then it would turn out that they'd actually made a mistake in their videos, which then meant my videos but have the same mistake as well. So I stopped doing that once I realized that that was a bit of a problem. And the other thing as well, sometimes you can go to an official distributor to actually get the specs. And even now websites have got it wrong as well. So if you just go straight to the actual manufacturer's website, you're going to have any problems in this department. Now the next section that actually want to create is a y section. I wanna talk about why have I been such an expensive chair over the chair I already had? Because that's going to be a huge question in for people that maybe aren't too inclined with what these Chair does. I want to say why is it was one hundred, five hundred dollars over the $300 chair previously used to have do a bit of a comparison between the two so people get a perspective on the quantity of this product. So we're going to just sort of throw in a few bullet points here that I had problems with my old chair. So for example, I had pool and a lumbar support. A PWM, not go high enough, I can get into height out of the chair. So we've now created a bit of a structure and a story with this product review video, we have introduced a product. We have introduced a problem that I had with my old product. And now we need to talk about how this new product counteracts for all of those issues that I previously had with my older chess. So we're now going to actually get into the first impression stages of the new Chair and my experience so far with this product. So we're now going to create a new section. I'm going to call this section first impression. So we're gonna go first impressions. And in this section here, I want to talk about some of the unboxing experienced that I actually had because the unboxing experience of this product was probably one of the best products I've ever on bogs. It was seriously very premium. Product came fully constructed. It just slipped straight out of the box. It was absolutely fantastic. Will also put the air, the fact that it comes built so we'll put their product is assembled. And we'll also mentioned that it has a 12-year warranty. And this is where we can talk about an interesting point now because the check comes with a 12-year warranty. Obviously this means I can spread the cost of this chair over 12 years, which means it cost me less than a 100 pounds a year to own this extremely premium chair that offers so many health benefits. So this is a huge Pro that we also want to mention inside of this review here, we want to just discuss about how it's actually quite cheap to own. A premium channel is going to be very healthy for you. So you want to put that it's less than a 100 pounds a year to own this chair. A 100 pounds a year to own this chair. For the chair, obviously, if you're going to use it for 12 years, but the fact that as a twelv year warranty one would assume that you can use it for even longer than that. So I won't need a new chair and tell him probably like 32 or 35, which is a huge statement to make in terms of a desk chair. And then for the final section of a YouTube video, this is where you wanna do your outro. Now you want to keep this nice and short around sort of 20 seconds now on YouTube, you can insert a end screen element which allows you to divert people to other videos. Click the subscribe button and not end screen element last for a maximum of 20 seconds. So you want to sort of conclude your video within that 20 seconds, telling them to check out this video here and subscribe as quickly as possible so that you get the most out of that feature on YouTube. So what we just want to put here is we just want to sort of PR. And obviously we wanna tell them to like and subscribe. And we want to tell them that we will do a full long-term review in the future. So we'll say long-term review coming in the future. Once I have more experience with the product. So that will encourage them to like and subscribe. Because obviously they're subscribing for something of interest to them. There's no point you're saying like and subscribe for more videos coming in the future. You want to tell them Like and subscribe for the long-term review of this product coming in the future where I can share more of my thoughts with this particular product is just allows him to go, oh, that'll be good to know in case I haven't even bought it in three months time when he brings out another review actually going in detail of some of the Kanzi's experienced over the long term of owning it. This is how our structure is going to look at in the next video, we're gonna go and actually filmed this video. So we've got our title, our Work in Progress title. We've got our introduction, the purpose of the video. We've got some features that we want to talk about. What can this chair actually do? What I'm gonna do a little bit of a Y section of why I've bought search inexpensive chair, comparing it to my old chair that was around 300 pounds, $400 area. And then we'll talk about the first impressions. Actually get to the review of this chair and some of the experiences I've had with it so far. And then we'll just go straight to the outro to keep it short and sweet and get that high retention to police the YouTube algorithm, Keep it nice and short, straight to the point and conclude the video. 8. Filming a YouTube Video: So now let's talk about the actual filming and recording process of a YouTube video. Now, since I moved into my new studio space, have really taken the time to optimize and make this as efficient as possible. Now the problem I had when I used the fill my videos inside of the garden shed was every time I would want to film a YouTube video, I would have to set up the tripod and the lights every single time. And then if I wanted to change the shot within the video. So for example, a different perspective of me filming in talking, I would have to move that tripod and move that light to an ultimate location and set everything up in dilate backing once again, which is really frustrating when I was creating the amount of videos. I do three videos a week on YouTube and then a course pretty much every two weeks. My website is then men would have to just spend so much time a waste so much time setting things up, which was really counterproductive. So what I've learned now I've moved into my new studio ways. I really took the time to create workstations that I can set the camera up in, in a plug-and-play fashion. So I now have multiple versions of the exact same tripod, all of which is the exact same camera mount, which means I can just switch the camera from this standing position to the SAT down position by the desk in literally five seconds. And then I can stop filming overhead video or a product review while sat down. Then I can come back to this shot here and just simply move the camera. I also bought some extra lights so I can have all of the lights just one fixed position so I can spend a day doubting all in getting the perfect look on my actual face. And then that light doesn't move. It's being sat there for probably a month now in the exact same position. So I've now made my studio plug-and-play. I just actually switch a plug on. All of the lights, turn on, all of the other things I use turn on, then I just have to mount the camera. Now if you're a beginner, I don't recommend investing this much in all of these different tripods and lights, but it's just important to start creating videos with what you have got. So I'm gonna talk you through the actual recording process that I undergo to create the YouTube videos. So when it comes to actually film the YouTube video, what you wanna do is you want to take your plan that we create in the last video and you want to mark which section is going to be short. Which camera angle, because you want to move the camera around your studio to keep the audience retention as high as possible. Because a huge beginner mistake is people literally just set up that tripod. They sit down and they film that entire 10-15 minute video from a fixed position, which then means the final product that's on YouTube has a terrible audience retention because it's a relatively boring video. This tells YouTube it's a rubbish video. So then it doesn't get promoted within the algorithm because it has a very low audience retention. So you want to move your camera around as much as you possibly can within your filming space to keep the perspective and the flow of the video constantly evolving. So what logically makes the most sense when you're actually filming these multiple shots within your videos is to bulk film each short individually. So for example, once you've decided in the planning stage which shot camera, a camera be, et cetera. You go about setting up your camera, your tripod in your lights for camera a, and then you film every single part of the video that you want to include with that specific show on that perspective angle within the video. And then you'll move on to camera B and film all of those sections as well. Even if it doesn't coherently makes sense in terms of your plan when you're actually filming the video because you can then take all of that footage in the edit and make it make sense in terms of the timeline that you actually imagined for the video itself, and then upload it to YouTube. It just makes more sense that bulk film everything in the sections and then move on to the next camera angle. And bulk film knows, even if it's all over the place in seemed a little bit sporadic in terms of not going through it in a linear fashion. Now once I've finished filming the talking head segments of my video, I then go about and begin actually editing a rough edit of the EEG video. This just allows me to establish a reflow of the video and I'll also watch it through a couple of times and note down particular sections where I've either made a mistake, It's maybe refilled that take or where I need to include any B-roll. Now, what B-roll is basically that is complimentary footage that you overlay on top of your talking head for each to sort of help you articulate a point that you're trying to make. So you're a role is you talking like what you're watching right now? And then B-roll is usually shots of any product you are talking about and they're very frequently in slow motion on YouTube. So once I've got the rough skeleton in a really rough edit, I then come back into the studio space here and I start filming all of my B-roll sections. And I do any retakes on particular sections that are not too happy with in can be a bit more concise in terms of the talking head. Now there's a lot of accessories that you can get to compliment that the filming of your Bureau. Now if you're a total beginner, I highly recommend just simply using your camera handheld. There's so much you can do with just using the camera and there's so much to learn about the different movements and what it takes to film would be real section with just your camera on my channel, I filmed over 200 videos on YouTube, all of which have been B-roll handheld. I haven't had any fancy things until the past few weeks when I upgraded to this camera gimble. Now this camera gimble allows you to map your camera onto it and it's motorized, allows you to have a motorized balance that really smooths out your camera motions and gives you extra options in terms of what you can film compared to handheld. There's sometimes when you're filling slow motion handheld, it can be quite shaky if you're not super steady with it. And you can be slightly restricted in the terms of the types of results you can actually get. Whereas with this, I can do a lot more fancy shots that I previously could not do due to the motorized functionality of it. But this is something really advanced. The issued get once you understand the premise of filming B-roll and you're looking to take things to the next level. There's also cameras, sliders, and all sorts of other things you can purchase as well that a motorized or not motorize to get unique and smoothers shots out of the camera, which are worth looking at as well, especially the non-motor ice sliders are relatively affordable and you can get some really smooth slider shots with just a camera and a cheap slider. 9. Editing a Video: So we're now going to take a look at the actual video editing process. Now I'm not going to take you through the step-by-step process of editing this video because I already have a class and course talking about that topic where I show you how to organize your footage, throw that into a timeline and use a variety of different shortcuts to save you load a time that you'll be sat there at the desk editing your video on trying to speed up your workflow. So if you're interested in a more detailed look into that, be sure to check out that class of. But what we're going to do is we're actually going to take a look at the final timeline of this video. And I'm going to talk you through some of the techniques and why I made the choices I did in terms of how I edited the video and the types of footage that I included. So let's take a look at the edit that I put together for this review. What we've got here is we've got two different shots. I've got this standing shot of Mr. talking, which you've seen already throughout the course. And then I have a complementary shot of me sat down at the table, which is over here now, and I'm sat down at the table. I'm usually actually physically demoing the jam, sat in the chair like I am right now. And I'm sort of showing the different positions that you can sit with it. And then when I'm stood up, I'm sorta sharing my thoughts about the chair roughly. Now what I've done to make this review as interesting as possible, I've heavily hat do show lots of B-roll of the jet because frequently I'm talking about features of the chest such as adjustments and all of the different features it can do. And the only way to illustrate that is to provide overlay footage of that actually happening. So parts of the arms and the fabrics of the chair. Otherwise, it would be really difficult for me to try and explain that verbally and really boring for people to understand. So what I have here is I have a mixture of B-roll that I've actually shot in slow motion on my camera. So you can see here I've got these beautiful slow motion shots that I've shot with my new camera. Looks really good. Nice little cut there just between the two. And I've got a cross dissolve. So this is a smoother transition, so it's less harsh and abrupt. And then I've also here got some snippets I've talked from the official website. So I was talking about the copper cooling technology in the form of this C, which keeps it cool about your sat in a chair. And I can't really articulate that without some form of animation. Now, yes, I could have made an animation from scratch, but it took me ages for literally like such a short period within the video. So I had to know over to Herman Miller's website and I've got this little bit of B-roll from where their product pages to clearly illustrate what I was talking about the new foam within the seats. Now you can see throughout the review to keep it interesting because it is such a boring topic. Talking about a chair, I have so many different shots to change the scenery, which is similar to what we talked about in the previous video where I took you through the actual filming process, showed a sharp B, C. This is a prime example of me doing this. You can see we go standing and then we go to the SAT down shot where I'm talking about the two different jazz. And then we progress into a bit of a zoom in here of me now soundness j, you can see how we have that jump that keeps it interesting again. And then finally as well, we have another jump. Can I constantly like to do this jump effect? I'd like to zoom in and then zoom back out. This almost looks like I'm changing. The whole composition of the shop. But all I'm really doing is having the same shot and then punch in and inside the video editing software and then punching back out. This helps with audience retention as well because to the viewer, the image is constantly evolving instead of remaining stagnant and in one position. So I do this throughout the entirety of the review. As you'll see, we're constantly jumping in and out. There's another example back out. Again. It just keeps the viewer engaged in those moments where things start to get a little bit boring if I'm brutally honest, because even I can get boring as you probably experiencing throughout this course. Now you can see here I've got some more beautiful product shots just overlaying to illustrate more points. Pass the J, He's me actually demonstrating the different reclined modes. Same again, have B-roll to cover up this mistake I made here. So here I accidentally made a bit of a mistake in my thing. So I thought, oh, I'll just throw a bit of B-roll of top that sort of hide that mistake. So then it's not too abrupt with another jump cut because there's certain times where you can do jump cuts, where you jump between mistake, mistake in two different takes. And then there's other times where that can be quite disorientating within the video and it just understanding how it feels when you watch it, whether it needs to be hidden or whether it's okay to show that mistake and the joining of two separate clips. It depends on your style. I like to make my style as smooth as possible, like as if I filmed the entire video in some miraculous single take. But usually it's multiple takes chopped together, hidden by little overlay shots like I have over here. Now you can see I constantly try to change the perspective of the B-roll shots that helps us well to obviously show of the product, but keep the intrigue there within the video instead of showing the same slow motion angle from me stood far away. I tried to get a close far away, zoom in on the camera lens and be further away just to get different fields within the shots to the still interesting, instead of shooting everything in the same way with the same angles in the same motion. Shouldn't the burial. This is just another shot taken from the official website again, because it illustrates a point way better than I could because something I faced a challenge when filming this video was the lighting my studio a. When I film at nighttime, it's quite dark like it is right now. Just got these big lights on, but there's not very atmospheric, these big lights for filming actual YouTube videos. So I struggle with lighting things at times with the types of lights. I've got something that I definitely need to upgrade in the future. Something that helps a lot is actually filming during the daytime. You may see on my YouTube channel I filmed during the day, if it's a beautiful day, but you are really restricted with daylight because if it gets dark like it does here in the UK really quickly during the winter months, you have such a short window to film a video and it's very obvious been filming for a whole day because you start off and it's the height of the midday and instead sunny and then two hours later while you still film in its pitch black. So most of the time I film in doc mode, I to call it with all of my Windows shoe. So it means I can just feel all day and it doesn't really change the whole vibe. And look if the video. But that's sort of a rough example of how I edit things constantly, keep things evolving as you can see, by changing back and forth between different camera shots and punching in and punching out. Just keep things interesting otherwise, things will become too stagnant in terms of a video if I just filmed everything from a single shot. Now what I have here and just above the all of the foot each year I have this thing called an adjustment layer. Now, inside of this adjustment layer, I have all of my color grading. So I've got a bit of a vignette EBIT as saturation in contrast in a little bit of color work to try and make the footage look a bit nicer. Now throughout this whole course, or haven't calibrated any of this footage in terms of a speed of just because there's so many videos to edit for the course. So this is just being straight out of camera. However, with this, when I do YouTube videos, I like to color grade the footage. So you can see here, this is what it usually looks like just as standard footage. And then this is what it looks like, color gradient, you can see it's very subtle, but there's just that slight Vignette around the edge to give it a bit more mood and focus on the subject who is b in this instance. And also you can see the saturation just increases ever so slightly within the face you can see just them skin tones and things come a little bit warmer. And it's something that I have with my brand of cameras, which are Sony. They, they don't do an okay job of replicating like skin tones, but sometimes they look a little bit to pink and you have to work with him a little bit more compared to other brand cameras have had in the past and is still a great camera. You can do way more than any other camera I've owned before. But that's pretty much how I edit AUG video and some of the techniques that I use punching punch now I use cuts, alcohol, that type of stuff, disorder, transition the audio smoothly between two different takes. And I also like to use these little sort of animations of texts and things as well to talk about. These are pitches, for example, but I like to have my little animations of my Like and subscribe that have made inside of Adobe After Effects. And then just little pitches as well of websites to illustrate what I'm talking about. Add a little bit of text here just to illustrate something as well that I missed when I was actually filming the video. It's just how I roughly edited a video. This is roughly how it looks. B-roll talking head. And these smooth that will cross dissolve between takes. So there's no abrupt clicks and pops between the two different vocal lines. 10. Creating a Thumbnail: So now let's talk about the YouTube thumbnail. Now a YouTube thumbnail is really, really important. We kind of discussed why it's important for the click-through rate already in this course, but it really is way more important than you may think now what a lot of people do, especially when the beginners is they're literally just take a screen grab from the YouTube video and that will be the thumbnail. They won't create a custom thumbnail and you're really missing out a huge opportunity, sort of leverage and optimize the video further. Now the software I use to create all of my thumbnails is Adobe Photoshop. This is what I've got booted up right now, and this is sort of the thumbnail design that I've went through four and I'll talk you through how I created this and my mindset behind the creation of this thumbnail and how it's going to work in combination with the title of the video on YouTube itself. Now I actually have a full cost. You can also check out deep diving into getting started with Photoshop, specifically looking at how you can create thumbnails with all of the different techniques that I use to create the different styles of thumbnails on my YouTube channel. So if you're interested in learning more about that in Adobe, be sure to check out that course for further details. Now there's a few requirements that you should really follow when you're creating your YouTube thumbnails. Now if you just take a look at the YouTube platform in general, and you have a browser round. You browse around on the iPhone, Apple, or just browse around on your desktop. You'll notice on every single video in the lower right corner of the thumbnail, There is a timestamp that tells you how long the video is. So it's really important when you are thinking about and creating your thumbnail that you do not include anything important in this lower right-hand region of the image because it will be covered up by the timestamp, which means if you put text down here, no one's going to see it. It's gonna be really messy and it's not going to articulate the point. Trying to do so, a few things I tried to follow is I try and put the text to the left hand side like here, because nothing's going to obtrusive here. Only the watermark appears in the bottom right-hand corner. So this texts can be as big as it likes, very visible, very bold, and it's not going to be covered up by anything on the YouTube platform. And also, I like to put it at the top of the thumbnail as well, which we've seen earlier on in the course when we were talking about the click-through rate in detail and why there's two videos on my channel had a really high sort of 12% click-through rate. The design of the thumbnail had text at the top. Now an interesting trick you could say I've done here to create this thumbnail a little bit quicker and try and make it look sharper and cleaner is, I've actually used an image taken off Herman Miller's website. This image right here, we've just taken off Herman Miller's website. It's an official product photo. And the reason why I've done this is I tried really, really hard to get a really nice photo of this chair, but no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn't get a clean background for all I wanted was the chair to be the sensor in the forefront of the video. And I tried for ages loads at different angles and I just thought, look, wasting loads of time here. I can't like the chair quite right how I want it to look. And the backgrounds too messy exact my drum kit in the background, in all my music equipment. And as I, it's just not doing it for me. So I had to look online, went to Herman Miller's official website and I found this image that was pretty much exactly the look, I want it now I recommend obviously taken pictures yourself with a camera. Pretty much all of my thumbnails are that. But in certain instances sometimes I do use an official product picture like this. If it's going to make my life a little bit easier in the look, I'm actually going for. So you can see here, I've just taken an official picture and I drew a rectangle behind it, match the colors up and did a nice fade between the two. So it looks like it's got a seamless transition between it. And then I've added this text saying one hundred, ten hundred and five hundred dollars desk chair. Now the reason why I've now included that in the thumbnail is because I'm going to change the title and we actually upload the video to be slightly different. So going back to our video plan where originally we had this in the Title, $1000 desk chair. Is it worth it? Now we're actually going to scrap that and put it in the thumbnail instead because it's super Bolden eye-catching because it's really in your face. Now a final recommendation that I suggest for the text of the thumbnail is keep it as minimal as possible. Now where a lot of people go wrong is they'll title De He Chu video with nice title. And then they'll basically copy and paste that exact title, pretty much word for word or there abouts into the thumbnail. And the thumbnail is really, really messy. And there's no point in repeating the YouTube title in the thumbnail because you just basically saying the same thing twice. And there's no need for that because you've got the title stating that anyways, so I like to put a different statement in the thumbnail. So this instance, we're putting the price and desk chair and we're taking that out of the title and we're going to reject the title when we actually upload the video. But also, you can see I've kept it to three words minimum. This is the maximum, sorry, three words maximum. This is the maximum that I recommend going beyond this point, it starts to make it some nella greedy, messy. It becomes unclear because you have to remember, you're not going to be viewing on a big screen like this. It's going to be on a mobile device. So it's probably going to be like this big on somebody's mobile, iPhone or whatever. And you can see, you can see that really clearly more than the actual chairs. And this makes you want to click on it because you like, whoa, how can an office chair be so expensive? Whereas if this was a more words than that and these were slightly smaller and it was all over the spot. That would have been really difficult to make out what this video is about when it was really small, like that. So that's what I recommend. Three words maximum, keep them spaced out and almost a bullet point fashion like I have here, nice and big so that bolts you can see them on a smartphone device and keep your statement in the thumbnail separate to what the actual video take a list and extra title in its own sure. Fashion. 11. Uploading a Video - The Process (Cards, Title, Keywords, Ads, Processing etc.): So we're now going to take a look at the video up loading process. Now this is one of the most important stages for finalizing all of the details of all of your hard work. And I recommend taking the time to do this correctly because you've spent hours creating, filming, and editing the video. There's no point in the final stage to just throw it up without any final thoughts. Now obviously, we've had a working title, Work in Progress title so far, drought during this course and when we just designed that sum, now I said I had changed my mind. Now originally I was going to include the price of the product in the title, however, now we've separated that and we're putting that into the thumbnail of the video. So this now means I've rejig the title in a slightly different way for the title of the video. This is what I'm thinking. I'm thinking we could say work from home in style. And then we'll put Herman Miller x, a logic G and body gaming chair review, which is the name of the product. I know that's a very long title, but that's because the title of this product is very, very long because it's a collaboration between Herman Miller and logic tech, so it's got to brand names in it. But the reason why I'm obviously putting the work from home and style is because at the current moment of uploading this video, it's a trending topic working from home. That's what the whole world's doing. Everybody's looking at ways to increase their productivity at home, make it more comfortable and more enjoyable to work from home. More office ex, feel instead of being really uncomfortable in a dining room chair that they may have been working in the past few months. So working from home in style and then the actual product name. Now it's important for keyword optimization that you always include the product name in the title. Because what are people going to be searching for? And they are going to be searching for Herman Miller, logic tech Gaming chair review. So it's important that we have those keywords in the title. So we've got Herman Miller, which is the brand of the chair. Logic tech is the brand they've collaborated with. And gaming chair is the main name of this chess. You've got those keywords there which are pivotal for IT ranking in search. And then we also have review because obviously people are going to be typing Review at the end of that title. So you want to appear for that. Now the next area where you can get a lot of benefit is writing a description. Now a lot of people write a terrible description on the YouTube video and I used to do as well. And when I'm back in the day when I didn't know what to say and it was really short and sweet. But in the description, this is another opportunity to cram it. With keywords and search engine optimization. You can literally write out the whole video if you want an each stage and Chapter of the video with a little paragraph in like bit of context about it. Because it's going to add to the SEO search engine optimization of the video, the more keywords you have in the description, YouTube's going to be able to present that to the correct people when people are searching for this product on Google, YouTube can present that easier to people on Google because YouTube has more information about the product. So this is just something that I wrote out earlier inside of a Word document. You can see it's a decent length. It's not too long, so it gives people a reason to actually watch the video. We can see I filled it with keywords again, Herman Miller, logic tag, we got gaming chair, we've got the price here again. We've also got a desk chair which your people be searching for. And we also have go Herman Miller once again and body chairs is time, which is a slightly different type but same type of chair that they sell. This is the newer version of it. You've got the price in there again for gaming chair, which is another pivotal key word, there is ranking a lot for this chair. So this gave me a, a, another opportunity to include it with keywords. And obviously I could go further with this if I really want it to. And sometimes if the video doesn't perform too well in the first sort of weaker. So I'll go back and reassess the description and the title and see if I can reoptimize it. And maybe I missed out some silly keywords that were actually blatantly obvious that I missed during the upload schedule. And there's actually a third thing you can do to optimize the video further. Now a final thing that you have to do for your YouTube videos now a 100% recommend during this phase is the YouTube keyword tags. Now a lot of YouTube gurus with hundreds of thousand subscribers say the keyword tags don't do anything for video optimization. And in my opinion, I think that totally incorrect because what I do is with every single video I've uploaded from day one, inside of the YouTube tags here, I have filled out all 500 characters as much as I can, as many characters as I can fill it. 499480, however many Adam fill within that video. And as you can see throughout this course, my channel is getting a 125 thousand views per month. And I only have 7 thousand subscribers. I get the same amount of views as a half decent channel with around 40 thousand to 50 thousand subscribers from my research and looking at the competitors and other YouTube channels on the platform. So that clearly signifies that these tags are clearly doing something to my video optimization. And I haven't another theory that I think these tags contribute towards the monetization in the optimization that of ads as well, the ad placement, I think they have a bit of relevancy to what type of ads appear on your videos, but that's a different conversation for another day. So with these keyword tags, I try my best to the brand that I'm mostly talking about. The product name review over overview on boxing first impressions or those types of things. And I also sometimes put competitors of the brand I'm talking about because obviously people are usually looking for a comparison between and the brand that I'm talking about when another competitor. So it's useful for them to find the video because they usually searching for different brands anyways, during the buying decision process, especially during a review. So I'm gonna grab some tags that I made earlier. And these are some tags that I made earlier on. So you can see here I've got Herman Miller and body, which is the type of chair Herman Miller N-body review, Herman Miller gaming check. It's a trending topic at the moment. We've got Herman Miller logic tech Gaming chair, which relates to this but slightly differently, Herman Miller, 1500-dollar gaining chair because that's another common keyword that I've seen knocking around. And also we have best productivity chair of his share because what are people going to be searching for, working from home and productivity improvements. So that's something that resembles a relation to our title that we created. And then there's loads of other things. Best Home Office shared 2021, working from home desk setup, all those different things that come with the target market of this products. Now there's a few final things you could fill in down here. The recording date, what date you actually filmed it on. I like to add this because again, that sort of helps with YouTube placing it for the most relevancy. You can add it to a playlist and then you can also add your custom thumbnail. Now it's agile thumbnail, you just simply drag and drop it or you can click upload and find the file. I obviously have the saved inside of my folder over here, so I can just drag and drop these in. And you can see here this is the thumbnail that we made earlier. And now you can see the relation between the title and the thumbnail. So you can see working from home in style, Herman Miller x logic tech Gaming chair. And then, yeah, you can see how we have the price Bolden in your face so people go, wow, how can this Chevy so expensive? Let's take a look at this and see what all this hype is about. Whereas this previously was going to be here instead of work from home in style. So that hopefully explains to you my theory behind the title and the thumbnail design. Now you see OPM piece together in the upload stage. Now the final few phases of the upload schedule is the Monetization tab is where you turn monetization on and you can decide which ads you add and add them manually. Mid role ads, because obviously this videos like ten minutes long so we can add multiple ad drops within this video. But that's obvious something to worry about when you're ready to partner. And then finally, you've got like the video elements that you can add, which are the YouTube cards and the YouTube and screen. And then from that point, you can save the video unlisted YouTube processes. So it is in full HD, 4K, whatever resolution you have filmed it in. And then boom, you can add a video, go live scheduling and do whatever you like. So that's the process of planning, editing, credit the thumbnail, and uploading a YouTube video. 12. Being a YouTube Partner - Benefits and Features: So now let's talk about the YouTube Partner Program. Now the YouTube Partner Program allows you to monetize your content on the YouTube platform. It allows you to put ads at the beginning and the end and in the middle of your videos allows you to pop up ads on your channel page, all sorts of different places. You can put ads within your video. Now to become a YouTube partner, the awesome requirements that you have to meet. And at first it may seem like quite an overwhelming task to hit these requirements, but in my opinion, it is achievable. It may take longer than you might first think, and it's 100% worth doing. Now, I think it's a good thing that the YouTube Partner Program does exist. A lot of people say, oh, it's YouTube killing the platform. It's a load of rubbish. People who can't get paid for making their content. And you could agree with this to some extent. However, it does mean it increases the quality of channels on YouTube, which means it's a better platform in general, a better user experience, which means more people will come to YouTube to use it as a platform because its quality, as opposed to how it used to be before these requirements existed, where anyone and everyone would upload videos and those videos will be able to make money. So it kind of dilutes the crowd and the noise on the platform and keeps the quality high, makes people who are serious about the platform really push their efforts to become a pond. So to become a YouTube partner, you have to have a 1000 subscribers and you have to have full thousand watch Alice. So obviously the watch always is the total number of hours watched on all of your videos from every single viewer who has been a pod of your channel. Now for me, it took me around six months to hit these requirements every single, every single week hours knocking out three videos a week as we've addressed at the start of this course. And then I finally hit the requirements and around it may have 20-20. I first hit 1000 subscribers, but didn't have the watch minutes there. The watch always quite nasa had to wait a week or so before I hit that. And then it was dead simple. I applied, they sent me a letter and then I was a part of the program. Now, there's some awesome benefits other than just putting ads on your channel that come with being a YouTube PAN. So if you go down to these Monetization tab inside of the YouTube studio analytics interface. This will tell you how you're doing in terms of the YouTube Partner Program. They will give you a little sort of a chart that tells you how many subscribers you have out of a thousand and how many hours you have out of 4 thousand, which allows you to keep track of your goal of actually hitting those requirements. So once you become a huge partner, this interface begins to change quite a lot. You can see here we have a few different options that I currently have in terms of monetizing my YouTube channel and as my channel grows and hits different milestones, mole features will be unlocked in the future. Now currently what I have available to me at around 70 thousand subscribers as a film in this class, I have a video advertising available which is turned on, which is obviously the Google ads in the YouTube ads that I put on to oversee help pay for the products and things that I review within my channel. And then I have channel memberships in soup is available to me now I don't have either of these features turned on and we'll talk about that in just a minute. Now let's first talk about the channel memberships that I have over here. Now with a channel membership, what you have with this feature is basically you can create almost like a VIP subscription. To your YouTube channel usually ranging around like five, 99, I think they usually on average, and what the membership would provide somebody would be maybe like some custom emojis that they could use in the comment section that for me that I be like a guitar or something like that. And you can also do maybe VIP membership only live stream. So if you're a member, you get access to the live streams or that type of stuff. You can charge whatever you like for these, I think YouTube take 50% of the membership that I may be wrong with that statistic, check that out, but I think that's what they take. Now I haven't set any memberships up and it's for this particular reason. So if we go to the membership tab where you would obviously setup your membership, set all of the add-ons that somebody would get within this category. You can see here, YouTube gives you a lot of information as to whether it's worth actually using this feature on your channel right now, you can see it says Channel memberships, right? For your channel, which is obviously my channel. And it says here, on average, 8% of my views come from my subscribers, which means the rest are actually coming from people searching for my videos which are established already throughout this course and how well and how important it is to rank in search. Now it says people who are successful with channel memberships have at least 25% of that channel views coming from their subscribers. So for me personally, I'm way below those averages. So a cello membership probably isn't going to perform that well on my channel anyways. And also because of the demographic of my audience being much older, they're probably not too interested in having special emerges anyways, because they probably don't use standard emojis within the comments section. So it's kinda the point is feature for me to offer them. Now, we want to the super chats that are available on YouTube. You have this option to create a Super Chat. Now you can use Super Chats within YouTube premieres and YouTube live stream. So a premiers kind of like a livestream, but you basically each streaming a pre-made video on a big sort of like red carpet premier event, virtually YouTube. Now with a super chat, what fans can do or subscribers can do is they can basically donate to your channel. So they could go, hi Ben, I love your content. You're an absolute hero. He is $30. It sounds crazy, but some gaming channels get like insane donations I that someone would be like, here's $30, keep on doing what you're doing. You changed my life. And that would come through as a big notification for everybody watching the live stream. It would go Jerry, just a stone-age $30 to Ben, and then everyone would see his little message. And then I would be able to respond to that because I got a physical notification of that comment and that donation. So that's how a Super Chat works. So if you're live streaming a lot, this could be a very useful monetization tool because obviously, video advertising may not be as prevalent if you're live streaming for 23 hours a day because he can't really adds in while you live in a difficult Wang Xia wanted just to maybe people watching you play your game or whatever you're live, streaming your gig, your music performance, whatever Super Chats is really interesting. There's a similar feature on switch as well for live streaming, but it's really cool and it's a very nice way for people to support the channel. Show their appreciation for recreates a and also help the creates a do what they do in terms of creating concept. Now, Azure channel grows, you unlock additional features. Now when my channels capacity is 10 thousand subscribers in the next few months, my youtube channel will unlock the feature to add a merchandise shelf. So basically, the bottom of every YouTube video, I will have the ability to add a merchandise shelf where I could sell a T-shirts, hoodies, mug, stuff like that. I think you sell other products as well that aren't as generic is t-shirts and things. But yeah, basically you unlock a merchandise shelf, which basically means you can have a storefront product page at the bottom of every single YouTube video you put on the platform, which could be a very useful feature for increasing conversion rate on your other products that you sell off of the YouTube platform. 13. Becoming a YouTube Partner - My Journey: So when I want to talk you through my actual YouTube partner journey, it took me six months to become a YouTube partner, but I wanna show you one of the strategies I used towards the latter stage of becoming the partner to sort of push it over the edge a little bit quicker and start getting the channel rolling in terms of the features that would be unlocked. Now, back in sort of March of the year, I was getting really close to 1000 subscribers. I think I maybe had 600 subscribers. I something like that. I think I hit 600 subscribers. And to celebrate hitting 600 subscribers, I started this daily video series. Now I call this daily video series daily loop. Now obviously I teach people about loop pedals inside of the music space. The series was a full tutorial of teaching somebody a song. So on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, which was the usual days I wouldn't upload. I would do a specific part to the song we were learning. And then on Sunday, I would release the live performance of that song that I perform. So people throughout the week could join me learning the track and the end of the week, they could see it in its fully fledged format. And then they could replicate and sing it themselves because they could see me perform it after learning in this format worked really well. So you can see here before I started the daily loop series, my views were very sporadic. You know, they would go up and I would upload, dip, go up, dip, go up. And you can see it's almost like a jaggedy dinosaur teeth you would draw as a child, it was very spiky, goes up, down, up, down. Whether I had this theory where I thought, well, if I upload daily videos that will stabilize the views across the entire week because there's a video every single day. So we're not going to have any of these spikes that are currently happening similar to you? My theory when I went from two to three videos. So when I did that, you can see we're perfectly fine though. The views across the week stabilized perfectly, but we hit about 650 views every single day weekend. It spiked when I did the performance video, which is obviously everyone tuning in after all of the tutorials to check it out and then go back and watch them. And it worked really well. It helped me keep that momentum within the algorithm and boost the channel into the next milestone, which was about 700 subscribers. So from this point, I discovered that this work obviously as well. A lot of people who are at home on the internet because you know what happened. And so I continue to do this series again, I did this to more time, so I did daily videos three times in 2020 and it was pretty intense, not going to lie, and probably won't be doing any time soon again. But it definitely worked for this sort of pushing it over that little sort of things. So I'll show you the next month, which was really interesting. And this was when I sort of started to actually get monetized. So you can see here a couple of weeks later, after increasing the amount of views i was getting average from doing this daily videos, I decided to do it again. So after, after that, I did it again. I did another daily loop series, stamps like an insurance songs and you can see it perform way better because it was a super popular track as super popular artists like the biggest in the world. And you perform crazy milling. I got 1000 views in the day for like the first ever time in the history of my channel. And this was really helping increase these watch allergy. You can see the watchtowers were going up per day, which is really important for hitting the requirements within the partner program. And then finally in May. In May, you can see that I did a daily loop series once again at it, daily videos for the third time. Now I actually plan to do these videos in case I hadn't still met the requirements, but because the second batch of daily videos perform so well, it meant that the channel is sort of a kinked up a bit and it kept sustaining those views. You can see at the start of May here we again about 1000 views a day still, just like we did when I did that sort of Ed shear in song. And then he taped down and went back. And then I decided to do the daily videos, but I'd already met the requirements at this point here. And I started and I got accepted into the partner program at around the fifth of May. So I went ahead with this daily series anyways because it was kind of filled and recorded. I just pushed it back to sort of celebrate hitting the 1000 subscribers At that point might have even been nearer to 2 thousand at that point, it was another celebrated every week. So I hope that brief breakdown of my YouTube partner journey kind of helps you understand some strategies you could use to shorter push the algorithm and get there a little bit quicker at that pivotal point when you're just about to hit the requirements and maybe need to boost the watch time, for example. And you've met the subscribers like the dilemma that I was facing. I hope that's useful insight for you, growing your channel. 14. More Skillshare Classes Coming! : If you have enjoyed this class and you want to learn more about becoming a huge Cuba and the types of skills you need to develop, the make sure you're following me here on skill share because throughout this year, I'm going to be releasing multiple different courses focusing on different areas and different skill sets that you need to know in order to grow on the YouTube platform in 2021. And if you've enjoyed this class, I would highly appreciate it if you were to leave a review. So usually helps me grow this platform here on skill share and help support making courses and future courses for you to watch and consume. But as always, I've been Ben Rhodes, Thank you so much for watching. Don't forget to check out the class project. All the information is down below, and I will see you in the next one.